Do a food tour
I don’t normally go on guided tours but in a place like Beijing, when you’re hoping to discover hidden gems and you don’t speak Mandarin, it’s the ideal way to get a handle on the food culture. I’m so pleased I did. In fact, I’d recommend that you take at least one – if not both – of UnTour’s three-hour food excursions (untourfoodtours.com).
Our charming guide, Garth Wilson, tells fantastic stories about the history of the foods and of China. You can opt for a breakfast or dinner tour, where you eat in little diners and at roadside vendors in hutongs (alleys) that you might never visit on your own.
Two venues on our morning tour are pop-ups, the vendors renting the space from 6am to 9am to serve food that’s very different to the dishes made by the restaurants that usually occupy the space.
Our first – and my favourite – stop is Hong Yan Restaurant, which does beautifully soft tofu with coriander, chilli, vinegar, seaweed paste and spring onion. Further on, Lao Tang Restaurant dishes up a roti-style bread with dried green vegetables and pork. The taste is sweet-sour and it’s the dried greens that make it so delicious.
Over the next couple of stops, we sample pork and vegetable buns, sweet fried bread with soy milk and chilli sauce (sounds crazy but it’s incredible), crisp fried bread dipped in sugar (a kind of Chinese doughnut) and a drink of fermented sprouts that’s supposedly healthy (the jury’s out but I’m glad I tried it).
We finish our street tour at a jianbing stall, where the crêpes are spread with egg and pastes (chilli-bean, wheat, fermented bean curd) then coriander and spring onions are added and a bean curd sheet is dropped in the middle. My tip? Eat it while it’s hot, as the bean curd softens quickly. It’s food experiences like these that I wouldn’t have had if I’d just gone on my own.